Man overboard

 

We had a report that the cruise ship Sun Princess, en route Auckland to Sydney, arrived one passenger short.  An 84-year-old man had fallen overboard.  I don’t know how you search one of those immense ships for a missing passenger – but this seems to have become academic anyway because they found CTV footage showing him falling into the sea.  Four hours earlier, at 3 am, his fellow travellers had reported him missing.

At this point we could have some black jokes about the increasing intrusiveness of spy cameras in our lives at every point.  Presumably there are cameras aimed along the sides of the ship, as well as along all the decks and companionways, restaurants, swimming pools, casinos, atriums, lifts…  Presumably someone on board is monitoring these things.   That’s a job I could apply for.

No one will ever know for sure whether he fell, or jumped.  The captain turned the ship to do a search, without result.  Heaven knows what that cost Princess Cruises.  Maybe he fell… and there has been some discussion about the height of rails on the many decks of these ships.  My wife and I recently spent two weeks cruising on Emerald Princess, around the Baltic.  The rails seemed fine to me. 

But it did occur to me that a depressed and lonely octogenarian might well decide to save everyone a lot of bother and expense, if he felt his life was substantially over, by getting a leg over the rail late at night.  It makes sense.  From one of those upper decks the fall to the water would be probably lethal. 

This is not something I would do.  It is something I could understand. 

But it would have been considerate to leave a note in his stateroom:

I’ve gone over the side.  It seemed best.  Love to all.  (PS:  Port side… although, as Lady Bracknell might have said, the side is immaterial.)

That should do it.  Then it’s tidy and considerate.  And it’s a lot less messy than all the conspiracy and drama accompanying elected suicide these days, expensive clinics and expensive drugs and excruciating goodbyes. 

Maybe this 84-year-old got plastered in one of the many bars, and simply fell off the deck.  But I doubt it.  I suspect he had a plan… and perhaps being rocked in the cradle of the deep seemed OK.


Later (2.12.2014)...  This morning early, in clear and still air, from our lounge, I watched a huge cruise ship steaming past the Tawharanui - Kawau gap, en route to Auckand.  On the web, on my iPad, I found it was the Dawn Princess, sister ship of the Emerald Princess on which we cruised the Baltic.  Dawn Princess was due to berth in Auckland two hours later at 0915.  I could even access her ship's web-cam, and see the way ahead.  There seemed to be no one falling off the decks...


I wondered whether, as we had steamed into Stockholm or Tallinn, Oslo or Gothenburg, some elderly gent had watched from afar and had similar thoughts.